Sea-level Changes

The United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit, UNCED), Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, held 3rd-14th June 1992, launched the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) which operates through its annual roadshow the UN Conference of Parties (COP) that seeks to establish sustainable management of the global climate system.

The  'Earth Summit' by UN in 1992 brought the problems  in climate to the attention of even some of the world's most remote and isolated nations. One of these nations was the Hopi Nation in Arizona, a non-sovereign nation - which the UN labels as 'indigenous peoples'. In a long chain of events beginning from the League of Nations' decision in 1926 to deny the First Nations of Americas and the small island nations' representation in that international forum, its successor the United Nations, turned down four attempts by the Hopi Nation to raise the issue between 1948 and 1992. Finally, in the immediate aftermath of the Rio Earth Summit (1992), the United Nations Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar authorised the Hopi Nation to table the matter to the floor of UN General Assembly 10th-11th December 1992.

The First Nations of Americas Ethnoclimatology Motion and the Tradition-Keepers ('Faith-Keepers') background to that motion is elaborated here in this UNFCCC submission with further points were raised in 1st-2nd October 2018 at CRIAS conference. This contextualises the First Nations of Americas UN General Assembly Investigation Request 101292 which was the Concluding Plea of the World Indigenous Peoples' Joint Summit with the United Nations Parties ('Member States') Delegations to open the first UN Year of the Indigenous People (1993) to other ethnoclimatologies appearing world wide. The Geophysical Annotations were discussed at the Cochabamba-Tiquipaya Climate Summit (CMPCC1) in aftermath of the collapsed Copenhagen Climate Summit COP15 (2009) with the request from the UNESCO Delegation of the Plurinational State of Bolivia on 7th January 2010 and His Excellency President Evo Morales Ayma.

The key tenents of the Geophysical Annotations being:

(1) A signal noise from a substantial radiocarbon-dilution effect due to major sea level retreats and rises during the Ice Ages that depressurised methane clathrates - releasing copious amounts of methane and carbon dioxide into air from depressurised seabed clathrates and also from thawing terra firma permafrost; this results in regressive, or sideway, 14C  readings in tree rings ("tree rings in a wrong order"). Thus, the Ice Ages era (the last glacial maxium to holocene thermal maximum period) cores of the tree trunks can appear substantially 14C-younger than the tree trunks' latest (outermost) tree-rings which cannot be the case due to the extreme steadiness of the radiocarbon's decay rate.

(2) Methane accumulates to upper troposphere, stratosphere, and mesosphere: hence any methane signature in the ice cores is only from methane-in-transit. Additionally the global warming episode that ended the ice ages had heavy methane loads that warmed and melted away most of the era's recent ice surfaces, thus obliterating the-then-most recently laid down snow stratum (leaving behind the earlier less methane rich snow layers). This caused incomplete records (time gaps) in the ice cores, and hence "global warming" always appears "before" higher atmospheric CO2 or CH4 levels (hence appearing as if them being 'respondents', rather than the drivers of climate warning).

(3) Noting that the partial melting equations can also be run inverse direction, it is proposed that the Pleistocene glaciations resulted in damage to Peridotite which partially melted producing basalt deposition in a large scale onto the seafloor in vast effusive eruptions with field emission of heat rather than radial spot emission of heat like in modern-day Surtseyan eruptions that have only a minimal heat crossing to sea surface due to small spatial extent of hot subsea surface. The vaporisation of sea water in field emission is vast due to spatial extent of hot subsea surface greatly exceeding the thickness of overlying water column, leading to runaway snowfalls. This caused an inflated size hydrological cycle which effectively washed out atmosphere-generated radiocarbon while geological seabed-associated depressurised carbon-12 was being released en masse leading to negligible carbon-14 readings (the radiocarbon-dilution effect by the Pleistocene's hydrological cycle / sea bed depressurisation).

On these three premises, the First Nations of Americans Ethnoclimatology Motion at the United Nations General Assembly on 10th-11th December 1992 is proposed as a variant possibility to the climate theories advocated aggressively by the Western Group of Nations and their influential academia. Its implications to present-day climate change suggest that the Polar Ice Caps will continue on their much-faster-than-anticipated loss trajectory to violent collapses. This aspect was highlighted in Sea Research Society's Evidence Giving at the UK Houses of Parliament in Environmental Audit Committee evidence giving on 5th and 24th April 2017. The urgency of situation is underlined by the fact that despite world-wide economic shut down by covid-19, carbon dioxide has continued its rapid rise to 417 parts per million indicating that time to act is running out as the remaining North Pole marine ice cap is soon to melt away and then destabilise the surrounding glaciers post Arctic sea ice (most notably the Greenland Ice Sheet).

The draft paper as at 24th April which is updated from the draft made for the oral presentation session (5th April 2017 does not contain any references and text errors needed corrections). The paper is still being worked on with more sections being added with some aspect areas clarified in more detail. Others are being reviewed. Due to the closure of the Parliament in the UK early for the snap elections, the text is still unfinished and will be resumed for the new Parliament session with no end date set yet. The document is best viewed by a download to Microsoft Word as web browsers tend to muddle the layout. Please note that the ice sheet mass balance changes occur mainly in nearby Iceland, Jan Mayen and the Mid-Atlantic Ridge rather than Greenland itself. (High viscous, low nucleation events pushing very cool, effusive, almost 'solid' lava incursions vertically up like the Mascarene volcanism of Mauritius are rare anomalies from a misaligned hotspot influencing further afield - and therefore far less likely.)

Long-term relative sea-level cycles (0Á5 to 6 Myr) have yet to be fully understood for the Cretaceous. During the Aptian, in the northern Maestrat Basin (Eastern Iberian Peninsula), fault-controlled subsidence created depositional space, but eustasy governed changes in depositional trends. Relative sea-level history was reconstructed by sequence stratigraphic analysis. Two forced regressive stages of relative sea-level were recognized within three depositional sequences. The first stage is late Early Aptian age (intra Dufrenoyia furcata Zone) and is characterized by foreshore to upper shoreface sedimentary wedges, which occur detached from a highstand carbonate platform, and were deposited above basin marls. The amplitude of relative sea-level drop was in the order of tens of metres, with a duration of <1 Myr. The second stage of relative sea-level fall occurred within the Late Aptian and is recorded by an incised valley that, when restored to its pre-contractional attitude, was >2 km wide and cut ≥115 m down into the underlying Aptian succession. With the subsequent transgression, the incision was backfilled with peritidal to shallow subtidal deposits. The changes in depositional trends, lithofacies evolution and geometric relation of the stratigraphic units characterized are similar to those observed in coeval rocks within the Maestrat Basin, as well as in other correlative basins elsewhere. The pace and magnitude of the two relative sea-level drops identified fall within the glacio-eustatic domain. In the Maestrat Basin, terrestrial palynological studies provide evidence that the late Early and Late Aptian climate was cooler than the earliest part of the Early Aptian and the Albian Stage, which were characterized by warmer environmental conditions. The outcrops documented here are significant because they preserve the results of Aptian long-term sea-level trends that are often only recognizable on larger scales (i.e. seismic), such as for the Arabian Plate.

Central Mediterranean shelves show a large variability in morphology (width, slope, unevenness), stratigraphy (different thickness of depositional bodies resulting from the last climatic/eustatic cycle) and sedimentology (shelf-mud offshore of the main river mouths, bioclastic sediment in under-supplied areas) because of their geologically young age and complex geological setting. To better understand relative sea-level changes during the Holocene, people have to consider that its variations are the sum of eustatic, glacio-hydro-isostatic and tectonic factors. The first is global and time dependent, while the other two also vary according to location. In the central Mediterranean region, several volcanoes are present with ages and activity spans from a few millions of years ago to the present. Their character and genesis vary according to the complex geodynamics of the Mediterranean region; a large number of volcanoes are located along the eastern and southern Tyrrhenian Margin and in the Sicily Strait.

Sea Research Society's poster "Looking At The Forward Running Clocks' - Carbon Cycles and Time From Pleistocene to Present" was presented at a major international conference organised by Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI): "Anthropology, Weather and Climate Change". This international conference took place at the British Museum from 27th to 29th May 2016. RAI organised it in conjunction with the British Museum's Department for Africa, Oceania and the Americas. Sea Research Society was asked during the conference to re-formulate this poster to an article for a peer-reviewed science periodical, the online science publication "Arcadia - Explorations in Environmental History", published by Environment and Society Organisation, by its editor Katrin Kleemann. We are working to issue this poster in a periodical format in a due course.  The key points and observations of the RAI 2016 conference poster and the forthcoming paper are:

The natural carbon and methane cycles are hugely disrupted by today’s human activities. The Palaeolithic meat-hunting evolved first to a very small-scale Neolithic cattle-rearing, then to today’s mega-scale industrial farms that increase methane in the atmosphere. Meat consumption, what initially started as a globally harmless hunter-gatherer activity has evolved into today's massive, environmentally highly stressful activity as world population has grown together with the land scarcity. Thus meat consumption has today emerged as one of the most important drivers of the anthropogenic climate change due to its addition of methane to the atmosphere.

The poster presents a hypothesis where the end of Palaeolithic (Pleistocene) thawing permafrost soils and sea beds (as well as the changes in the sea bed pressurization), destabilised methane clathrates and became important and major contributor to the carbon cycle at times of lowering sea levels.  Meanwhile, the Pleistocene era's cold oceans captured carbon from the atmosphere more effectively than during the warmer Holocene. Thus it is postulated that the destabilised methane clathrates (both from on-shore and off-shore permafrost) replenished the atmospheric carbon stocks by carbon-12 and carbon-13 rich 'old' carbon isotopes (due to above sea bed depressurisation and melting-derived permafrost soil outgassing). The permafrost-released 'old carbon' thus skews the Pleistocene to Holocene Thermal Maximum eras' carbon isotope portfolio in biological samples which results in a lowered carbon-14 content within biological samples (as the plants do not differentiate between the three carbon isotopes).

The presence of permafrost-released old carbon can be detected by plant metabolistic research of the period's samples from which it could be concluded that short-term carbon-12/13 permafrost release intake (hourly and daily isotope variation in carbon synthesis [changes in temperature and prevailing wind direction]), seasonal carbon isotope variation (spring-autumn in carbon synthesis [spring-time carbon capture from the atmosphere versus later releases of old permafrost carbon once permafrost melts towards the autumn]) and multi-year carbon isotope trend (the long-term build-up of old carbon in the air mass) analyses can be carried out. These result in radiocarbon outliers, or radiocarbon-dilution, in biological and archaeological materials retrieved from Pleistocene to Holocene Thermal Maximum period.

The poster (paper) also discusses the reasons for the absence of elevated carbon dioxide and methane levels in the era's ice cores and correlates this anomaly with the present-day rapid deposition of carbon, especially methane (that has increased 4.4-times faster at 74 mb level in the atmosphere 2013-2017 that it does at ground level). This is due to cessation of the filtering effect of hydroxyl that tends to oxidise methane relatively rapidly into carbon dioxide. This filtration mechanism appears to have faltered since 2013 allowing the lighter-than-air methane to rise and accumulate in the upper troposphere and stratosphere where there is very little hydroxyl to oxidise it. When this is taken into account, a new image of 3-tier greenhouse effect emerges in the Arctic region, where methane traps Outgoing Longwave Radiation (OLR) extremely efficiently at high altitudes, carbon dioxide traps it at lower altitudes and melted snow and ice cover forces ground to absorb more sunlight at surface level. As methane appears to be accumulating in the current Arctic warming well above all glaciers, this must also have happened invisibly throughout the Pleistocene glaciations and contributed to the period's highly volatile climatic rollercoaster movements.

The poster (paper) then discusses methods and presents examples of some well-known mega radiocarbon-outliers as potential artefacts of the above proposed radiocarbon-dilution effect (which did not leave any signs of its existence in the ice cores of the past eras as methane's primary build up - in the absence of oxidising hydroxyl - occurs well above the glaciers at the very high altitudes of the upper troposphere and stratosphere). Moreover, this implies now that the Arctic might very soon and unexpectedly enter into a runaway warming state from the above-said high altitude methane accumulation which originates from melted and perforated soils and sea beds - and equally importantly from the positive feedback of the lower troposphere's hydroxyl filter failure since 2013 (as illustrated in the bar chart). The paper's major concern is less on the carbon dating effects, but rather on the possible global warming risk of a very large increase in atmosphere's carbon-12 and carbon-13 stock from methane. This release of carbon occurs initially as high-altitude methane and only later as closer-to-surface level carbon dioxide (which leaves its signal behind in the ice cores; see the temperature curve diagram of the warming occurring prior to carbon dioxide build-up in the ice cores (the red arrows) which warming trend is, thereafter often arrested and punctuated suddenly by the rapid collapses of major ice shelves and ice sheets or glacial melt water reservoir discharges, i.e. producing the cold 'Dryases' (the blue arrows). These releases will obviously skew future carbon-14 readings even further and possibly even more than our anthropogenic fossil carbon build up from the present-day use of fossil fuels.

More examples of radiocarbon-dilution effect (radiocarbon mega-outliers) will be given in the forthcoming paper. The poster invitation was presented at the conference prospectus: "RAI/BM16 - Royal Anthropological Institute, British Museum Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas: 'Anthropology, Weather and Climate Change - British Museum, Clore Centre, 27-29 May 2016'. Conference programme and book of abstracts", published by the conference organisers Royal Anthropological Institute (RAI), The British Museum (BM) and the Wenner-Gren Foundation (WG), on a page 148.

After a short summary on the process and rates of intertidal bioerosion that deepens tidal notches, some case-studies are presented of tidal notches prevented from forming or being not preserved. In conclusion the lack of local fossil tidal notches cannot be relied upon to interpret the absence of past periods of relative sea-level stabilization.